Free Sex and Death by Sarah Hall Page B

‘I lied.’
    â€˜Well, it’s not an easy thing to talk about,’ Rodney said. ‘But if you lie to me again, I will divorce the living shit out of you. Just so we’re clear.’
    Cora did not ask how much Rodney had heard of her conversation with Tom. If her husband was guilty of a cruelty, it was that he did not immediately let on that he had heard it all. Rather, he hoarded the contents of the wiretap and returned them to Cora, moment by moment, at moments calculated to cause her pain.
    â€˜For someone who didn’t want to have sex with me ever again, you did a bang-up job,’ is something he told her one night after a satisfying bout of lovemaking.
    Lying tranquillised on the sofa of a Sunday afternoon, the curve of her skull warmly cradled by his chin, he said, ‘Even if this is you not being in love with me, it seems to deliver the same basic neurochemical effects.’
    Then Cora would go in for briny testimonies, swearing, no, no, no; he’d overheard only the meaningless lies of a horny lady trying to ease Tom’s conscience about screwing someone’s wife. ‘But he’d fucked you once already,’ Rodney pointed out. ‘What easing did his conscience really need?’
    Cora demonstrated her remorse with grand mortifications of her checkbook. She bought for Rodney a pair of $700 boots and, for $1,200, a set of Japanese kitchen knives whose whorled blue blades were so delicate they had to be stored in specialscabbards packed with rust-retardant gel.
    She spent thousands on a three-day reservation at a coveted hotel upstate. It was built of garbage: cardboard, shipping pallets and rendered plastic waste. The grounds were unstrollable. The glades were seeded with kitchen leavings to solicit visits from bears.
    â€˜My little six-year-old boy, who’s started to act like a real little terrorist, today he asked me, “Daddy, why is it so easy to be bad?”’ said a voice on the Christian radio station Cora was flipping past on the drive back to the city. ‘I told him, “We’re all born with a dark place inside of us, and every time we sin, that dark place gets bigger and bigger and easier to fall into.”’
    This caused Cora to lurch against the window glass and sob.
    â€˜Ah, fuck, okay,’ said Rodney in a sigh. ‘I don’t think you get to do this any more.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜All this grief and guilt, what you’re doing, you’re hijacking the story. You got it on with some guy, and you’re sorry about it. Only you’re so sorry about it that you’re the injured party now.’
    â€˜I’m not the injured party.’
    â€˜Yes, you are. You’re so broken and stupefied with guilt that this AM radio jackass has you in hysterics, and now I’m the noises-off in your one-woman contrition play. It’s not even good theatre. You go and do this not-nice but extremely standard thing, and now you’re biblically wicked. Presto-Christo! Now you believe in sin.’
    As a matter of fact, she did believe in sin. She did believe that a tar pit was spreading within her and corroding her decent parts. Tom was not the first person with whom she had betrayed her husband. He was the eleventh, in the past six months.
    Her work, she felt, was to blame. A spasm of unanticipated career success had lately come to Cora. It had bent her id.
    She had started out in photography with earnest aims. It wasthe work of Dorothea Lange, Jacob Riis, Ben Shahn and Walker Evans that incited her to buy her first camera. Her sincere, early ambition was to spend her life taking pictures that mattered of people who did not. But there was rent to be paid, and Cora ended up in the lucrative business of taking pictures that mattered not at all of those who matter quite a lot. Actors, musicians, home-run kings, senators and warlords made visits to her studio. It was exciting stuff, at first, standing in a room